Starbug
From Tongue Tied
The Jupiter Mining Corporation transport vehicle Starbug (full name Starbug I) is a relatively small shuttlecraft, green in colour. It has three bulbous sections; the cockpit, mid-section and engine rooms, somewhat resembling a bug from the exterior. Starbug replaced Blue Midget as the crew's primary choice of shuttle in Series III and became the show's primary vehicle throughout Series VI and VII.
The original Red Dwarf came equipped with at least four Starbug vessels, as Starbugs are abandoned in "Backwards" and "Terrorform" as a result of crashes by Rimmer and Kryten, with Lister and RD: Bodyswap retrieving the two in another Starbug both times, and in "Bodyswap" after Rimmer (using Lister's body) crashes it and is retrieved by the others in Blue Midget. The reconstructed Red Dwarf of the Series VIII "Back in the Red" episodes contained an entire fleet of Starbug and Blue Midget craft, but the nanobots reconstructed Red Dwarf to its original design specifications (before any and all budget cutbacks).
Series VI takes place a full two centuries after the final episodes of Series V. As the internal layout of Starbug differs from that of the vessel's appearances in previous episodes, it is possible that Kryten remodeled one of the Starbug vessels during this time to better suit the crews needs, and extended it in size, being the only one not in suspended animation.
The new design featured four main areas: the cockpit in the front section, the midsection and galley on the middle section bottom deck, the observation room (which doubled as quarters and medibay) on the middle section top deck, and the engine room, which was over all three decks of the rear section. In addition, Starbug was finally armed with laser cannons in the episode "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" by rogue simulants looking for a challenge. Previously the crew had shot molten piles of garbage out of the ship using an airlock.
Throughout Series VI and VII, Starbug is regularly seen traveling through different planetary systems and through completely different regions of interstellar space within short periods of time. Thus it stands to reason that Starbug is capable of interstellar travel. However, it is clearly stated that Starbug has no faster-than-light capability; it merely runs on hydrogen-powered thrusters, and so it remains a mystery how the craft manages to travel trillions of kilometers every few hours or every few days. One fan-proposed theory is that Starbug has an extremely powerful albeit semi-functional tachyon-powered drive that can periodically provide massive jumps through space (but still not enough, however, to catch up to their mothership). Super tachyon-powered drives are mentioned at various points in the Red Dwarf television series (such as in the episodes "Holoship" and "Ouroboros"), so they are indeed part of the Red Dwarf canon.
For Series VII, Starbug was redesigned again, partially rendered in CGI and the sets were made substantially larger (the Starbug of Series VII was apparently similar to the TARDIS in "Doctor Who"; being larger on the inside than outside). The complex explanation on this occasion for the redesign was due to a time paradox caused by the battle with their future selves at the finale of the previous series (see episodes "Out of Time" and "Tikka to Ride"). Kryten explains that "dimensional anomalies" caused by this time paradox had expanded the engineering section, the cargo bay section and the maintenance ducts by over 212%. Apparently parts of the upgraded future version of Starbug from the time line they erased also came to co-exist with the present Starbug (such as the ability to travel through space and time).
The new model had a smaller cockpit window (as a result of the rest of the craft being larger) and newly backward-angled legs, and its larger size allowed for many extra rooms, including separate quarters, a medibay and a re-designed artificial reality suite. This version of Starbug would finally be destroyed when the ship crashed and exploded in the newly-rebuilt Red Dwarf at the beginning of Series VIII.
Starbug is shown to have an internal cloaking device installed in Series III episode "Backwards", as this feature has been rarely seen in the series it is not known if it is a standard feature of the craft or a custom modification.
Starbug was used as the background for the Red Dwarf Series III DVD cover.
In the Red Dwarf novels, Starbug also crashes onto an ice world: a rogue planet which, after being captured in a star's orbit and having its ice melted, turns out to be the Earth itself, which was ripped from its orbit after being officially renamed "Garbage World" and turned into the solar system's rubbish tip. Following the thawing of the ice, Starbug is all but destroyed by extremely concentrated acid rain. However, Starbug is back and functional in both the following novels, possibly rebuilt.
[edit] Notes
The introduction of Starbug was prompted by the introduction of Kryten as a main character, which required a new, bigger shuttle to hold the crew. The original concept of Starbug was named White Midget and was going to be white. With the second episode seeing Starbug crashing into a snow-covered planet the design team decided to recolour the ship green to increase contrast and renamed it "Green Midget", before realizing its similarity to a bug and renaming it once more as Starbug. However, a script error does have Lister saying "How else can I pilot White Midget?" — although he was misnaming Blue Midget, the reference has left some fans intrigued. A ship named White Midget would finally appear on-screen in Series VII, in a flashback to Kristine Kochanski's alternate universe pre-accident. Like the crew's alternate uniforms in blue rather than beige, however, this is presumably a difference in her universe — although a different, unnamed, white ship would appear as the Canaries' primary transport in Series VIII.
The "Red Dwarf Companion" includes a sketch of an unused shuttle craft design that is described as being the design for White Midget. This also features an early Starbug design labeled "Green Midget".
In the audio commentaries for the Series IV DVD, Chris Barrie surmised that the spherical construction of Starbug was the reason for its durability.
[edit] See Also
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